Cinematic Cityscapes
Course Code:
HTC2200
This course explores how design is connected to place, the human body, and materials. Instead of treating people and environments as separate, the course examines how they constantly influence each other. By looking at these relationships, students will rethink how we understand, experience, and design the built environment.
The course uses ideas from several different fields. From neuroscience, we will learn how the brain, nervous system, and senses respond to environmental stimuli. From cognitive science, we will explore the idea of enactivism, which suggests that cognition is embodied and comes from our bodily interactions with the world around us. Affective science and environmental psychology help us understand how places influence our emotions, moods, and how we can design atmospheres – and how our feelings affect the way we perceive spaces. The course also draws on ideas from phenomenology and new materialism, philosophical approaches that help us think about the relationships between people, environments, and materials. Together, these perspectives suggest that bodies, environments, and materials are deeply connected, and that design can be understood as a practice that works with these relationships.
Throughout the semester, students will develop theoretical knowledge while also completing experimental design exercises. These exercises will explore how ideas from theory can be applied in design practice. Rather than focusing only on form and function or only on human needs, the course encourages students to think about sensory experience, emotions, and material qualities in design.
Lectures will be combined with readings and short design assignments. These assignments will investigate how elements such as space, materials, light, sound, texture, and scale affect how people think, feel, and behave in different environments. By combining theory with hands-on experimentation, students will learn new ways to design for multisensory experience.